The Middle Road of Classical Political Philosophy: Socrates' Dialogues with Aristippus in Xenophon's Memorabilia

1994 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 671-696 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth C. Blanchard
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
The Self ◽  
Philosophical Investigation ◽  
Political Responsibility ◽  
Citizen Soldiers ◽  
Complete Rejection

This article examines the contrast between philosophy and sophism in Xenophon's Memorabilia, focusing chiefly on the two dialogues between Socrates and Aristippus. In two crucial respects, Socrates and the sophist appear as opposites. He accepts what the sophist rejects: the obligations and restraints imposed by the city's laws; and he rejects what the sophist accepts: the vulgar notion that everyone knows what the good things are. In the first dialogue, Socrates defends the self-discipline proper to citizen-soldiers against Aristippus' complete rejection of political responsibility. In the second, he points to the substitution of the beautiful for the good as the proper object of philosophical investigation, hi both dialogues, Socrates walks a middle road: he is more political than the sophist, but less so than the politician. Yet he proves to be close to the politician qua philosopher than he is qua citizen.

Political representation: the view from France

2019 ◽  
pp. 89-103
Author(s):  
Raf Geenens
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
The Self ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Self Image ◽  
Claude Lefort ◽  
Mutual Relations ◽  
The Way

It is now widely accepted that political representation is not merely a passive, ‘mirroring’ process, but that the process of political representation plays a constitutive role in the construction of citizens’ ideas and preferences. This chapter argues that French political philosophy points to an even more fundamental role for power and representation in the construction (or the ‘constitution’) of society and the self-image of its members. It focuses on a key argument of political theorist, Claude Lefort, who maintained that the specificity of a society is determined by the way power is organized and symbolically represented in that society. On this account, the importance of political representation goes far beyond the formation of opinions and the process of collective decision making. The organization and representation of power is instead seen as a key determinant of society’s self-understanding and of the way citizens within that society understand themselves and their mutual relations.

Plato's Critique of Hedonism in the Philebus

2008 ◽  
Vol 102 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT C. BARTLETT
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Precise Nature ◽  
Crucial Question ◽  
Human Good ◽  
Self Knowledge

No one can claim to have thought seriously about the question “How ought I to live?”, the guiding question of political philosophy, without having confronted the powerful answer to it supplied by hedonism. In thinking about hedonism today, we may begin from that thinker who was both very important to and early in its history: Plato. Of the dialogs that have come down to us as Plato's, only the Philebus takes as its direct aim the examination of pleasure's claim to be the human good. The Philebus culminates in the suggestions that the need for self-awareness or self-knowledge may finally be more fundamental to all human beings (and hence to hedonists) than is even the desire for pleasure, and that the experience of at least some pleasures constitutes a great obstacle to precisely the self-knowledge we seek. The Philebus is important today not only because it contains a searching analysis of hedonism but also because it compels us to raise the crucial question of the precise nature of “the good” with which we are justly most concerned—our own or that of others—a question whose centrality to self-knowledge we are in danger of forgetting.

The political and conception of the self – a Wittgensteinian approach to political thought/ Polityka bez podmiotu – wittgensteinowska perspektywa w myśli politycznej

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Krzynówek-Arndt
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe paper proposes to examine the variety of ways political theorists understand the political importance of Wittgenstein’s thought. Any analysis of Wittgensteinian political philosophy start from different understanding of this philosophy of language and possible ends of philosophical activity. However, each attempt to interpret the significance of Wittgenstein’s work to political thought anticipates or is linked to a particular conception of the self, a particular conception of the human being that is not easy to reconcile with the Wittgenstein of Tractatus and the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations. For that reasons any Wittgensteinian approach to political thought should make an attention to the way Wittgenstein discusses on the self, the “I”, the way we use the word “I”.

scholarly journals On Dr. Stockmann’s Parrhesia: Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People in the Light of Foucault

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-48
Author(s):  
Mohammad-Javad Haj’jari ◽  
Noorbakhsh Hooti
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Self Care ◽  
Political Corruption ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Self ◽  
Unique Position ◽  
The People ◽  
Final Failure ◽  
The Right

Abstract An honest intellectual dutifully standing with truth against lies and treacheries of his society is a parrhesiastic figure in Foucault’s terminology. Foucault takes parrhesia as the fearless and frank speech regarding the truth of something or a situation before truthmongering and public deception and he takes the parrhesiastic as the spokesperson for truth. In this light, Dr. Stockmann in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People occupies a unique position within Ibsen’s political philosophy. Dutifully criticizing what the majority blindly take for granted from their liar leaders in the name of democracy, Dr. Stockmann fulfills the role of a parrhesiastic figure that stands against socio-political corruption. He enters a parrhesiastic game with both the majority and the officialdom to fulfill his democratic parrhesia as a truthful citizen before the duped community, while covertly preparing for his own philosophic parrhesia or self-care within the conformist community. However, his final failure lies in his confrontation with democracy itself, which wrongly gives the right of speaking even to the liars. This article thus aims at analyzing Ibsen’s play through a Foucauldian perspective regarding the concept of parrhesia and its relation to democracy. It is to reveal Ibsen’s satire on the fake ideology of democracy and highlight the necessity of humanity’s parrhesiastic self-care for the well-being of the self and the others.

Montaigne on Aging

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia Skenazi
Keyword(s):  
Old Age ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Philosophical Investigation ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
Cognitive Capacities ◽  
The World

Scholars have long seen in Montaigne’s turn inward, toward a psychological and philosophical investigation of human identity a mark of the modernity of the Essays, but they have focused on a static conception of the self, without taking into account Montaigne’s emphasis on his decline. This article discusses the essayist’s pervasive references to his old age as a way to relate to oneself, the other, the world, and to his literary endeavor. The portrait of the writer as a man growing old is embedded in the systems of knowledge of the day, yet Montaigne’s pragmatic reflections on how to adjust to the damages of time on his physical and cognitive capacities still speak to us.

How To Do Political Philosophy

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. A. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
The Self

This chapter argues that is impossible to explain to anybody how philosophy is to be done. The only way to teach people how to do it is by letting them watch, and listen, and imitate. The least charitable explanation of the self-same fact is that because those who have learned how to do philosophy struggled so hard to get where they are, they are selfishly reluctant to share some of the fruits of their struggle for free: they think that others, too, should suffer. There may be some truth in each explanation. But however all that may be, Cohen gives some tips about how to do philosophy. After giving these preliminary tips about how to do philosophy in general, he turns to some tips about political philosophy in particular.

Man is a Wolf to Man1

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Still
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
The State ◽  
Fruit And Vegetables ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Scarce Resources ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Natural Man

This focuses on Derrida’s analysis of the figure of the wolf in the first volume of The Beast and the Sovereign, particularly in La Fontaine’s fables (where the wolf can represent the sovereign as well as the outlaw) and in political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, notably Hobbes’s De Cive and Rousseau’s Discourses. This is developed with reference to other texts of the period such as the Encyclopédie in which wolves are represented as man’s enemies, rivals for scarce resources, notably food. The wolf is typically evoked as solitary and hungry; for Hobbes he, like man in the state of nature, is dangerous. For Rousseau, on the other hand, both wolf and pre-social man are shy rather than violent, preferring flight to fight – and food is naturally abundant for natural man who would in any case prefer fruit and vegetables to meat. The politics of food and taste are critical both in the self-fulfilling prophecy that man will become a wolf to man, and in the extermination of wolves.

On the Origins of Conventionalist Political Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emanuele Castrucci
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Political Anthropology ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Philosophical Investigation ◽  
Private And Public

At the basis of any consideration about the modern state of experience lie concepts of great theoretical and practical import, such as the dialectic between private and public, ‘internal’ and ‘external’, essence and appearance, which only a historiographic-philosophical investigation into the origins of the new conventionalistic concept of political order allows us to clarify. I will endeavour, therefore, in the following notes, to focus on the theoretical elements that the new political anthropology injected into the circuitry of sixteenth-century Europe, thanks especially to key thinkers such as Montaigne and Charron, convinced as I am of their thematic relevance in the context of a closer analysis of that phenomenon of primary importance now called, to use Benjamin’s term, the ‘crisis experience’....

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael LeBuffe
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
The Self ◽  
Similar Kind

Spinoza’s uses of reason are systematically connected. In metaphysics, reason is an explanation, and each thing is, like God, its own explanation. In human minds, ideas of reason are, in the first instance, ideas of what is common to all singular things. They are powerful ideas and a kind of knowledge. In morality, the commands of reason draw upon both these senses of reason. They derive their authority from the self-explanatory nature of God, and their strong motivational power is that of ideas of reason. Finally, in political philosophy, the peculiar motivating power of ideas of reason is a source of cooperation in society. A psychologically similar kind of idea—the idea of a miracle—is highly irrational. Because we all possess ideas of reason, however, Spinoza can envision a society that remains stable even as many citizens progress from irrational to more fully rational sources of motivation.

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